


Blood Web

by softsylvie



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: benny you deserve so much better bro, just a creepy one-shot thing don't mind me, the entity is a creepy thing that picks at minds whoops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-09-19
Packaged: 2018-12-31 13:33:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12133596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softsylvie/pseuds/softsylvie
Summary: Benedict seeks to understand the Entity while clinging frantically to his sanity.The Entity is something that should probably be left a mystery.





	Blood Web

Had anyone else been gathered at the campfire tonight, they would have likely told him that he needed to rest.

They would tell him that he needs to stop, stop before he kills himself. Then they would realize what a bad joke that is and promptly shut their mouth. It’s fine, it’s all the same.

Benedict has gone nearly four days without sleep, not that he can tell the difference. In the thick of the mists, their own personal cobwebs sheathing this dark world, he can barely tell what’s real and what isn’t. He writes in his journal so that in his own way, through the flute of his narrative, he can try to keep tabs on himself. It’s a way to keep himself anchored because the way he figures it, delusions aren’t going to bear consistency. 

So he writes.

He writes like a demon has taken his hands at the end of each trial.

Figures flash their frightened and helpless faces through the fog, there’s the thick wrunching of snapped bone, and a scream that trails into silence as someone is dragged to the basement. 

He ducks behind a wall of grimy wooden logs, fingers clawed in the moss until his knuckles crack. 

_The understood battlement from which none return,_ he writes furiously of the basement. _The stockade of the dead. Bloody ramparts, where if you should venture down, you can hear it chittering eagerly as if those hooks are none other than its grinning teeth._

And by god, he’s right on that one.

He’d watched a young woman get dragged off a while back. A young thing, wispy and blonde and starry-eyed with distant aspirations to become a great playwright. She had gone a couple years at university, before she’d decided on a gap year that ended with her retreat in the wrong mountains. They had talked a few times at the fire. She had clung to him for the sake of keeping human company because that’s how it was done in these situations, and he’d kept his careful distance, knowing how likely she was to survive the span of realms beyond. 

_An entire span of worlds we’re thrown to, like a glass of crickets into the tank of a nestled Rose Hair. This place is an ever stretching gut, always fattening itself, yet always hungry…_

She had gone down those stairs howling like a shot rabbit. Slung over the Trapper’s shoulder, beating into him with her fists, screaming, sobbing, begging.

Benedict hadn’t even learned her name. 

He’s just _been there_ too many times.

_The beasts do not heed your cries nor care what we lose. They move, they operate, they gather for this Entity as if they are but empty machinations. Our horror is the truest one, where we might suffer the same **SLEEP**_

Benedict pauses for a second, staring down at the tattered, yellowed pages of his journal. He has reason to believe that his mind might be slipping a bit – because hell, wouldn’t anyone’s, wasn’t that the _whole goddamn point_ – but he’s very certain he never meant to write that. His mind is open, clear, driven by fright and the demons that have his hands, he’s quite certain of that.

_**SLEEP.** _

It rings from the woods beyond the glow of the fire, and Benedict lifts his worn gaze to the black edge of the trees. He’s too tired. He’s just too tired to flee to another arena, to get up and run, to hide in the fog again. He knows what will happen once he loses the orange spark of the fire behind him, what will happen once he descends into the woods. The fog will curl in, darken around its edges, and he’ll be snuffed like a candle before waking on his feet in some other forsaken place. 

Same damn thing as always.

_**SLEEP. SLEEP NOW.** _

He remains rooted where he is, staring into the impending blackness of what could be death or the heart of the universe or the gaze of a devil. He stares straight ahead, he doesn’t hear the words as much as he feels them, rolling like waves of oil through every crinkle in his brain. 

“Is that you?” he whispers, to a divine one that only minds the ants beneath its fists when it wants toys to play with. “Are you…?”

_**SAFE NOW.** _

The Entity whispers that promise, and Benedict has no choice but to believe. Because the Entity is a god, is God, and Benedict is a believer by virtue of keeping hold of his own mind. He disbelieves, he doubts, and he will fade into the fog forever. 

_**SAFE. THEY ARE NOT HERE.** _

Whenever the Entity has spoken to them in the past, usually, Benedict can’t even describe the sensation. His human mind being the trap it is, however, he makes the attempt to describe it so that he may understand it anyway. When he hears it, he can feel the roots of his teeth tremble. When he hears it, he can feel the writhing itch of black widows scrabbling in his eye sockets. When he hears it, he can feel his vocal cords twist in his throat while something claws at the back of his chest. 

Here, though…

In this moment, where the Entity seems to gently roll all its filth through his mind and politely offer him reprieve, it’s almost… soothing. 

“Some sort of…!” Benedict swallows hard. He’s scared to close his eyes. “I don’t…!”

_**YOUR MIND FRAYS.** _

Very true, but this is a savage twist of the thing’s claws in him just the same. Benedict wants to fight it. He does. But every muscle sits as cold and thick in him as lead, every bone aching, every inch of strength whittling away. Benedict sits there, broken and beaten inside and out, and once he feels the cracked hide journal slip from his fingers, he knows it’s a losing battle. He’s tired. 

He’s been pushed to his last vestige, and that _thing_ knows it.

_**SLEEP, NOW.** _

“Why?” Benedict snaps, gaze shifting to his journal lying uselessly in the dirt. He wants to reach down and pick it up, resume his writing, but his body refuses to budge. “Why should you want any relative comfort for us at all?”

 _ **REST YOUR MIND. YOUR SUFFERING IS DONE. FIND SOLACE, NOW.**_ It speaks almost tenderly, though even here on the threshold of temptation, Benedict knows that it’s an imitation at best. The Entity doesn’t know compassion, not even pity. _**YOU HAVE DONE SO WELL. REST, NOW. SLEEP. REST.**_

And little by little, second by second, he feels so very _calm._

 _Conspiracy,_ his mind screams, as he’s plunged into the rocking waves again and again. _Intoxication…? Some sort of intoxication, but for what purpose, for what reason, for what… for…._

There is a tiny fragment of Benedict remaining to fight this, a lone soldier against a respite he’s wanted for so long, now. A tiny fragment shrieks at him to turn away. For the love of god and all that is holy, man, fight this! Twist wax in your ears and blot out the song before your ship is dashed on the rocks! It screams first from inside his head, a pinprick of sense that holds on as his body relaxes.

Every tension, every fear, whittled away in the sloshing oil. Swept out like flotsam on those waves, carted off to a black sea, buried until it’s all needed in the next trial.

It ends up screaming from within the journal that lies like any other limp body Benedict has seen in the arenas. 

_**SLEEP.** _

His eyelids slam shut. He slumps like a sack of potatoes until he slides down the side of the log he’s been sitting on, not that he notices the scratch of bark on his skin, the thud of his body hitting the cold ground. He falls with a dull thump on his side, eyes dull as scuffed stones while the flames dance. Anyone can come knocking, but they’ll find nobody home.

_**SLEEP, NOW. COME TO ME.** _

Benedict sleeps, and he sleeps long and well and thankfully with no dreams. Or at least, that’s what he will tell himself upon waking, when the Entity’s gentler voice keying within him will be a distant memory at first. 

When he next opens his journal, he will judder free a memory almost as torturous as his first time on the hook.


End file.
